The Pure Folly of Claiming Weight Loss Is An Anti-Weight Stigma Measure

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As the weight loss industry works furiously to co-opt the work of fat activists and weight-neutral health advocates in order to sell dangerous and expensive weight loss methods, I’m seeing an uptick in attempts to couch weight loss as an anti-weight-stigma measure. This is not just wrong, it’s deeply harmful.

First and foremost, while oppressed people get to decide how they deal with their own oppression, promoting the idea - or creating a marketing program - that tries to convince oppressed people that their best path out of oppression is to pay you (and lobby on your behalf) to be able to engage in dangerous interventions in order to try to change themselves to suit their oppressors, is wrong. The problem with oppression is the oppression and those who are doing it, it’s not the targets and victims. As someone who is both queer and fat, I, personally, am no more willing to try to lose weight to escape weight stigma than I am willing to try to be straight to avoid homophobia.

Often this idea of weight loss as an anti-stigma measure is pushed by the pharmaceutical and weight loss industries. Diet drugs and surgeries carry significant risks to fat people’s health, lives, and quality of life. The notion that it is worth harming or killing fat people in attempts to make them thin (including and especially for profit) is NOT an anti-stigma stance.

These messages also misinform well-meaning people about what fighting against weight stigma looks like. If the content they see is sponsored by the weight loss industry, they get the distinct impression that, for example, using stigmatizing “person first” language that pathologizes body size is helping fat people (when, in fact, it’s just part of the diet industry’s marketing,) and they think that lobbying for insurance coverage for dangerous weight loss drugs is an anti-stigma action (when, in fact, that’s just the diet industry manipulating them into being unpaid marketers and lobbyists.)

We have to be diligent about this because the diet industry is incredibly subversive in what they are doing. If it’s helpful, I created a handy guide to figure out if something is actually anti weight-stigma or if it’s just diet industry propaganda, you can find it here.

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*Note on language: I use “fat” as a neutral descriptor as used by the fat activist community, I use “ob*se” and “overw*ight” to acknowledge that these are terms that were created to medicalize and pathologize fat bodies, with roots in racism and specifically anti-Blackness. Please read Sabrina Strings: Fearing the Black Body – the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and Da’Shaun Harrisons Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this.